


Rule 303

by Arithanas



Category: Leverage
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, direct action as way of redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23096731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arithanas/pseuds/Arithanas
Summary: Eliot had been having strange spendings, of course, Alec Hardison had to know in what fresh trouble his friend was.
Relationships: Alec Hardison & Eliot Spencer
Comments: 10
Kudos: 44





	Rule 303

Hardison knew there was bad news as soon as he heard the engine of Eliot’s Challenger. Eliot seldom parked his orange muscle car with black racing stripes at the back of the brewpub, but when he did, it meant trouble.

The back door swung open and crashed against the wall. Eliot was standing in the doorway in his leather jacket and a wool cap. His hand was clutching a ream of paper and Hardison knew immediately that his latest shenanigans had Eliot throwing a conniption fit. A swirl of early January snow found its way inside their headquarters.

“Stop following me!” Eliot demanded and tossed a bunch of papers over the control deck.

The photos were printed on cheap bond paper. Hardison had seen enough surveillance videos to know where Eliot got them.

“It’s a DV shelter!” Eliot almost spat at Hardison’s face. “Wanna guess the effect of a big, strange man prowling about?”

“Hey, man,” Hardison tried to shield himself from Eliot’s anger. “I wouldn’t need to follow you if you could answer simple questions.”

It all started a week ago when Hardison noticed some irregularities on Eliot’s personal account. Hardison had tried to get a straight answer to the question about whether Eliot had any new expenses, but Eliot had scoffed and turned away. Hardison had persisted in asking, and Eliot had threatened to rearrange Hardison’s teeth if he didn’t drop it. Eliot could be very persuasive when the mood struck him.

“You have no right to ask questions, Hardison! You are not entitled to answers either!”

Hardison was almost overwhelmed by the statement, but his eyes caught the stare. That was Eliot’s guilty stare, the one he gave with stiff shoulders and his eyes fixed over the head of his interlocutor.

“It’s not like you were committing a crime, bro. When you break the law you usually require my help…”

“Dammit, Hardison!” Eliot lunged forward and tapped on the photos as if he was trying to bore a hole through the paper and the table. “Stop following me!”

With those words, Eliot turned around and disappeared the same way he'd come.

_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_

Hardison had been tracking Eliot’s expenses since he’d noticed the sustained increase. The things Eliot had been paying for were a strange assortment of products and services. A hundred dollars for a transporting service, another half thousand to a department store; a few hundred for utilities; another hundred for school supplies; a monthly fee for something labeled “misfits.” The only expense Hardison could believe was for Eliot’s own benefit was a huge lot of kitchen supplies, but Hardison would be damned if he could tell where Eliot put all those knives and industrial pots.

There was only one way to ease Hardison’s curiosity. Renting a car and following Eliot’s Challenger through transit cameras was never any trouble. Hardison had never rolled through Westmoreland, but he knew a residential neighborhood in trouble when he saw one. Eliot parked his car in front of a red brick building and entered the place like it was his home.

Five minutes later, Eliot came out followed by a small battalion of preteens with snow shovels and salt buckets. Hardison got out of the car with a thunderstruck expression plastered across his face. In the crisp winter morning, Eliot’s voice was clear as a bugle while he trotted his usual military step.

“Birdy, birdy, in the sky,” Eliot sang and his junior troop repeated the call, “dropped a whitewash in my eyes...”

“I’m no wimp, I won’t cry,” a chorus of young kids followed the line with laughs and giggles, “I’m just glad that cows don’t fly!”

“One-TWO!”

“Three-FOUR!”

As long as Eliot and his flock of kids were making that ruckus, Hardison wouldn’t miss them, and he wanted to peek inside the house first. He, of course, knew better than to cup his hands against the first window he found: he located a house without a dog and went on to be a Nosy Nora through the backyard. After Hardison managed his way through a field filled with spare wood, he peered through the glass. Inside was a kitchen where youngsters were busy cutting vegetables. There was a veritable horde of kids…

Curiosity satisfied, Hardison went to find a coffee shop to get something to warm his hands. On the way, he found Eliot supervising his troop of kids as they cleared driveways in the surrounding neighborhood. Very strange.

They eventually returned to the house. Hardison waited for a couple of hours inside the car as Eliot was going in and out, followed by a bunch of teens with toolboxes. There were a bunch of them working on simple things, changing sockets, fixing wall contacts… One of them changed the doorbell and Hardison could see, even from his car, the wide smile on his face. Eliot was standing next to him nodding approvingly.

Very strange, indeed.

_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_

His morning ride presented him with more questions than answers and Eliot’s outburst had caused him mild discomfort. By the end of the day, he was sure a movie was the only way to force the thoughts to the background. Some answers came when you didn’t actively search for them. Parker had hopped up next to him with a bowl of popcorn and a thousand questions about a plot she refused to follow. She was as sweet as ever, but Eliot’s familiar weight on the other side of the bed and his constant sniding remarks were missed. Parker never lasted until the end of the movie, as she bored easily. Her weight against Hardison’s shoulder and the faint warmth her body radiated was nice, and Hardison almost dozed off.

That night was a busy one in the restaurant, the faint din of the dining room and the waft from the kitchen where the cooks were working on the appetizers almost lulled him to sleep. Hardison’s brain jolted into consciousness when a new sound reached his ears: the mighty Challenger’s engine cooling off in cold weather.

Hardison got up and looked at Parker. She was such an angel when she slept. With care, Hardison pulled up the covers and moved downstairs as silently as possible. He picked up a soda before tossing his jacket on.

This was not the first time Eliot had disappeared the whole day and returned later with his head clear. Hardison loved those nights because Eliot got chatty after a fight. Not that fighting necessarily made Eliot more willing to share, but at least he could better use his words.

Eliot was sitting in the loading bay, legs dangling over the edge, bundled up to withstand the arctic winter. If Eliot saw Hardison walking his way, he didn’t even flinch.

“Hey,” Hardison called out and sat next to Eliot. “Where have you been?”

Eliot made a vague gesture that could mean a heap of things and nothing at all. There was an open bottle of beer in his hand.

“Have you ever wondered why you were born?” Eliot asked instead of answering.

That was Eliot, completely unable to give a straight answer to the questions that really mattered. In the middle of the night, he was prone to asking himself the thorniest philosophical questions. Hardison twisted the cap off his orange soda and took a gulp before answering.

“Not particularly. Have you?”

“I don’t need to ask,” Eliot replied and hooked his boot on the dock lip. “I know.”

“Like you could know that!” Hardison exclaimed. Part of him was hoping Eliot would explain his assertion. Another part of him wanted to hear Eliot was born to work with Leverage, but he knew that was too much to ask for.

“Some babies are born because people don’t know better. Others because daddy and mommy paid for them with sweat and tears. I was born to fix my parents’ marriage, and it sort of worked the way they planned.” Eliot took a deep breath. “There was a time when I thought I could fix anything… That was my reason to be, you know?”

Eliot lifted his beer and stopped for a second to look at Hardison out of the corners of his eyes. Hardison kept looking at Eliot’s car as if his friend hadn’t just dropped a bomb. Hardison hated Eliot’s parents for a brief second: it was unfair to expect a baby to shoulder that responsibility.

“I was told I was a blessing and could fix anything. I could fix the petty fights of the kids at my school, and I could fix the bike of my crying neighbor, and I could fix that pretty girl’s broken heart.” Eliot nodded as if he hadn’t noticed Hardison’s stare. “There was nothing I couldn’t fix if I put my heart into it.”

“What happened then?”

“I enlisted because I was going to fix the world.”

Hardison scoffed and closed his eyes. In his mind, he could see Eliot as a young idealist, in his uniform, with a glint of supreme confidence in his eyes. Eliot never spoke of the horrors of his youth, but it was obvious his plans got thwarted somewhere down the line.

“I can’t fix this world,” Eliot said after a while with evident desperation in his voice. “It’s fucking broken.”

“Tell me about it!”

“You have eyes!”

Hardison nodded again and took a sip from his bottle. If Eliot was in the speaking mood, it was good to let him talk.

“Have you been working with this shelter for long?”

“Since we were in Boston…”

_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_

 _He has a gun_.

The text on his phone screen made Eliot’s blood boil. Since he was young, Eliot had hated bullies, and people who abuse their partners were just overgrown bullies. There was only one way to deal with them.

“Take the kids to the bathroom.” Eliot wrote back once he could even out his breathing. “Put them inside the tub and close the door.”

Eliot stepped out of his car and trotted to the main door of the building. They had been planning this extraction operation for a couple of weeks now; an old army friend had put it all into motion. Sergeant Moses had met Ellie in church, and she had managed the painstaking job of convincing the desperate mother of two that an escape was possible, provided she was willing to move two counties over. Ellie said the kids had made their personal emergency relocation kits and had stashed them under the bathroom counter. They even had a modest and safe—Eliot had personally installed the locks and changed the door security screws—apartment for them to live in. They just needed the right extraction team.

That was when Moses called Eliot’s number.

For the last three days, Eliot had been camping outside Ellie’s apartment, ready to spring into action the first time her bastard husband got ready to bang some heads. That was the legal way to do it: Eliot would be just a concerned citizen worried by the noise. So far, the bastard had been shouting and dozing off in a drunken haze, tossing around idle threats. Eliot was not in the mood to wait for an invitation any longer. Not when a gun was in the house.

 _We are in the bathroom_ , Ellie reported from the old burner phone Moses had given her.

Moses had given Eliot the code to enter the premises. He only had to climb up two flights of stairs. He was aching to knock some teeth from that bastard’s mouth.

“Don’t open the door.” Eliot texted back once he stepped into the dilapidated apartment complex. “No matter what you hear, don’t open the door.”

Eliot dialed another burner phone number, looking with distaste at the damp patches on the wall. As was customary, there was no greeting.

“Your people will be free, Moses.”

“Praise the Lord.”

Eliot climbed up with the phantom of a hundred pounds of equipment on his back. His first instinct was to kick the damned door down, but he knew it would only work to that bastard’s benefit. He knocked with the peremptory hit he had learned from the police.

“Open up, Charles!” Eliot demanded with an authoritative tone.

Charles opened the door because he was a bully, and bullies were scared by authority figures. He was drunk enough to carry his gun to answer the call in his dirty shirt and even dirtier boxers. In his drunken stupor, Charles didn’t know how to react when it was just Eliot, standing there with a big shit-eating grin on his face.

“Who the fuck are you?” Charles slurred the words with a dopey, confused expression.

“I’m the man who has come to take your wife and children away, Charlie boy.”

Charles tried to level the gun at Eliot’s face. Eliot didn’t have time for those games. Charles’s weak wrist almost snapped when Eliot twisted it. To spare Ellie’s ears the whimperings of her excuse for a husband, Eliot punched Charles in the throat. Eliot then took the pistol, unloaded it, and put it in his pocket before he punched Charles’s beer gut again. The man was a quivering mass at Eliot’s feet after the first five seconds.

Eliot sighed and dragged this excuse of a man to the nearest utility closet. A couple of zip ties around his wrists and ankles and a thump on his head were enough to make sure he wouldn’t hamper Ellie’s escape.

The door was still open, and Eliot entered to put the gun, which he wiped clean, on top of the little dinner table. The small apartment had all the markers Eliot had learned to notice. Piles of empty bottles in the kitchen, broken toys, smashed mirrors, sunken places in the drywall… The floors, the windows, the surfaces were clean, Ellie was a good mother, but there were chairs with broken legs and couches propped up with bricks she couldn’t repair. She was a good woman.

“I’m outside the bathroom,” Eliot texted and waited for Ellie to open the door.

Silence on the other side of the door. Dead silence.

“You are scared, I know,” Eliot texted after a couple of minutes. Moses should be on her way. “I can kick in the door, Ellie, but that will frighten your kids.” Another message. “Please, open the door.”

After a while, the knob turned slowly and the door opened a crack. Eliot stood there with a fake smile sprawled across his face and his hands stuffed in his pockets. The perfect image of the Boy Scout he never got to be. Ellie’s haggard expression melted in dubious relief. She was probably expecting Moses; Eliot was quite short on the reassuring front for her comfort. She was almost pretty when she was not worried out of her mind.

“Miss, you can step out.”

“Who’s he, Mommie?” A kid only a few years old asked as he pushed aside Ellie’s skirt to see Eliot better while still standing behind the safety of his mother.

“We’d be the cavalry!” Eliot cracked up a real smile as he delivered the safeword. “Ready to go to your new house?”

Ellie led the kids outside, with their bags on their backs. Eliot closed the formation, making sure no one had followed them. In a building like this, you couldn’t count on the help of your nosy neighbors, and Eliot needed to keep an eye on any doors opening behind them. Moses was waiting in a battered Corolla right at the door of the building. Eliot watched Ellie and her kids climb in. He tapped the roof twice and Moses started her way to the promised land.

Eliot climbed up the stairs again, retrieved Charles from the closet, tossed him to the couch without too much care, cut the zip ties off, turned off all the lights, and made sure he closed the door behind himself.

He hung around inside his car, nursing a stale cup of coffee with his phone resting between his parted thighs. 

He was waiting for Charlie to turn on the lights. Charlie boy needed to get the fear of God instilled into his bones, and Eliot was more than ready to deliver that particular sermon.

_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_

“What drew you to this particular shelter?” Hardison asked and interrupted Eliot’s silence.

Eliot stopped before he could utter that she—even the thought of her name hurt so much!—always called him a good boy. She always had a smile and an encouraging word for him even when times were dire. Eliot stopped before he could tell Hardison he would gladly build a shelter in every city of the country—two in each state capital—to hear her say he was a good boy again…

There was no use dwelling on the impossible. She was gone and that hurt again like it hurt the first time.

“I wanted to help…”

Hardison put the cap on his orange soda and rested his hands on the dirty floor behind him and chuckled.

“We have money. We can donate to them if you want to help!”

“You can’t solve this by throwing money at it. Nate got it wrong!”

“It can’t hurt.” Hardison almost sounded hurt. “A nice round sum could help the shelter…”

“That’s the problem,” Eliot almost groaned. His head was pounding as if he had just endured a sustained SAM assault for hours. “I want a world where we don’t need shelters. Not for this issue. Throwing money at it only will make the shelter bigger, and it wouldn’t fix a thing. What’s the difference between that and what we do now? Huh? I’m sitting on top of this big pile of cash, and I’m doing nothing!”

“Who said you had to do anything?”

Hardison was looking at him, and Eliot felt the despair growing inside him. Hardison, with his toys and his movies and his knowledge… the smartest man Eliot had ever known... didn’t get it.

“Rule 303,” Eliot mumbled and turned his eyes to the ray of moonshine dancing on top of his car’s hood. Eliot could feel a waft of warm, desertic wind caressing his nape.

“Wh…?”

“Google it!”

Hardison jumped back and held his hands up to signal to Eliot that he was not looking for a fight.

“Those kids… they came from a rough home, from bad times.” Eliot said after a while, because Hardison was here, and, even if he couldn’t get it, he had a good listening ear. “I understand that. Sort of… Kind of… They’re angry because they are getting help. Help that came too late…”

Hardison was looking at Eliot with a strange look on his face, and Eliot suddenly felt ashamed. Eliot could almost taste the whining in his voice, but he couldn’t stop now. Getting help was humiliating after a while, but it was not Hardison’s fault that he got lucky enough to have someone who cared for him early.

“I understand anger,” Eliot sipped a bit more of his beer. “This world is full of hurt that turns into anger in time. That anger brings hurt and the cycle continues. There is only one way to get out of an anger circle.”

“Manual labor?” Hardison’s voice sounded skeptical.

“Control.” Eliot rubbed the back of his neck; breathing was getting difficult and he tried to moderate his breathing. “Work lets them have money. Their own money, no hand-me-downs. Work is the way to blow out the anger and money is the way to ease their hurt. They...” Eliot gulped and closed his eyes. “With honest money in their hands, they have a chance to change their lives.”

Eliot took a sip of his beer to distract his mind. Money and control and work to let the storm pass raging over his head. Eliot understood anger and hurt, but he had been a coward for a long time. Cowardice, as his first drill sergeant had instructed Eliot the first week of BCT, is the lack of action when one is required. No more, no less. If this were an Army affair, Eliot wouldn’t complain if he were dragged out to be shot at dawn.

Civilian life was a lot harder, and there was no drill sergeant to guide him into action. Eliot only had his moral compass (somehow it had survived some horrifying tumbles), his skills and the firm conviction that someone had believed once he was a good boy. That was not enough...

“I’m planting a tree under which I’ll never sit,” Eliot said, letting his empty beer bottle hang from the tips of his fingers. “I fucked up this world some way or another and I’m trying to fix it. One kid at a time…”

Hardison passed his arm over Eliot’s shoulders and pulled him against his chest. No words, just one of those messy side hugs Eliot had grown to tolerate. Eliot didn’t question the caress; he was just too tired of holding his emotions in check.

Eliot rested his head against Hardison’s shoulder and let his friend become a shelter against the guilt and shame. Hardison was mumbling softly, holding him against his chest. Eliot could hear Hardison’s heart pumping and Eliot focused on that big heart. His monkey brain, so full of regret and hurt, needed a job.

“I got you, bro…” Hardison said a lot later, after the night personnel dragged the trash out, after the brewpub turned dark and quiet. “I got you.”

_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_-°-_

“This is our communal kitchen,” the administrator of the shelter explained to Hardison. She was a young Desi girl, but Hardison couldn’t miss the martial bearing of her step. “Our guests get cooking lessons from a local chef twice a week, and they plan and cook the weekly menu under his supervision.”

Hardison, dressed in a nice three-piece suit, nodded and smiled. A couple of school-age kids passed by them with several hampers of clean clothes.

“Lovely,” Hardison commented as he smiled at the kids.

Eliot had spent the night on the couch after his anxiety attack. Eliot’s PTSD flare-ups were very subdued—like everything with the man—but they were there. If Eliot was racking his brains so hard that he had forced his mind to misbehave, this place was important to him and Alec Hardison was nothing if he was not a supporter of his friends. Eliot’s little project deserved some attention on his part.

“We are not a big institution,” his guide insisted and her tone became a little bit more formal. “Our main branch is in Boston and this house is experimental. We are trying a new approach to help our guests get to their feet and on their way to a better life as soon as possible.”

“What’s the average time spent on the premises?” Hardison asked. He was playing a lawyer trying to find a suitable charity for an unclaimed inheritance.

“It varies from case to case,” the administrator explained and tapped the shoulder of one of the teenagers working on a subwoofer on the kitchen table to catch his attention.

The teen looked at her with a baleful look; light reflected off the nose ring in his tattooed face. Hardison noticed his guide pointed to a dropped magnet on the carpet and his whole face changed. The boy picked up the piece with some muttered words of gratitude.

“Our main contributor insists we prioritize taking in mothers with more than one kid,” she resumed her explanation. Hardison noticed she let him infer the chef and the contributor were not the same person. “Those are the hardest cases to arrange. Three to six months, minimum. We also have a problem with safe houses. Portland isn’t precisely cheap for a single parent with a single income.”

Hardison made a note to get some cheap properties. It was a good way to launder their ill-gotten gains. The sound of a dozen chopper bikes interrupted Hardison’s train of thought, and the main door swung open.

“Last call for the workshop class!” A big man with a walrus mustache bellowed and closed the door almost immediately. Hardison was almost sure he had seen that face in the brewpub.

“Part of our new approach,” the administrator explained as a good half dozen boys and girls rushed out with toolboxes, “someone said ‘don’t get your kid everything you didn’t get in your childhood’.”

“‘Teach your kid everything your parents didn’t teach you’.” Hardison completed the Bruce Lee quote.

“Precisely.”

Hardison approached the back window and looked at the spare wood from inside. These were the materials for vertical gardens, but they didn’t look like that from the outside the building.

Some things only make sense when you look at them from the inside out. Everything made sense in context.

Just like this place…

Just like Eliot.

Words were not enough to express how proud Hardison was of his friend who believed in Rule 303.

**Author's Note:**

> Rule 303: "If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act." 
> 
> This fic and its author owe a lot to farkenshnoffingottom and S. who made it better than it was at the begining.


End file.
